☕ Coffee is awesome. ☕

A (very) brief overview

Coffee is a brewed drink prepared from roasted coffee beans, the seeds of berries from certain flowering plants in the Coffea genus. From the coffee fruit, the seeds are separated to produce a stable, raw product: unroasted green coffee. The seeds are then roasted, a process which transforms them into a consumable product: roasted coffee, which is ground into fine particles that are typically steeped in hot water before being filtered out, producing a cup of coffee.

Clinical research indicates that moderate coffee consumption is benign or mildly beneficial as a stimulant in healthy adults, with continuing research on whether long-term consumption reduces the risk of some diseases, although some of the long-term studies are of questionable credibility.

The History of Coffee

The earliest credible evidence of the drinking of coffee in the form of the modern beverage appears in modern-day Yemen from the middle of the 15th century in Sufi shrines, where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed in a manner similar to current methods. The Yemenis procured the coffee beans from the Ethiopian Highlands via coastal Somali intermediaries and began cultivation. By the 16th century, the drink had reached the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, later spreading to Europe.

To learn more about the drink as a whole, click here.

Preparing Coffee

Coffee can be brewed in several different ways, but these methods fall into four main groups depending on how the water is introduced to the coffee grounds: decoction (through boiling), infusion (through steeping), gravitational feed (used with percolators and in drip brewing), or pressurised percolation (as with espresso).

My personal favourite method is either pour-over with a device like the Hario v60, or espresso-style with the Aeropress.

But now, I want to know: